Half a Life

Eighteen years ago author Darin Strauss struck a girl on a bike while he was driving. The cyclist, a girl from his high school, swerved in front of his Oldsmobile and was killed. Strauss survived and went on to make a name for himself as a novelist with Chang and Eng and More Than It Hurts You.

Recently, he broke two decades of self-imposed silence and released a memoir of the tragic event and its aftermath. The non-fiction account Half a Life is a book about how the writer has tried to live with a terrible error behind him. Strauss shows us how the agonizing questions he's faced since that afternoon have made him who he is. In their review of the book, the New York Times wrote: "What is truly exceptional here is watching a writer of fine fiction probe, directly, carefully and with great humility, the source from which his fiction springs."

Strauss reads at Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle on October 2.